MapR recently announced including Apache Drill in its latest release of MapR distribution. Apache Drill is the open source version of Google’s Dremel. Dremel is the infrastructure on which BigQuery is based upon. Drill is offering a low latency SQL-on-Hadoop interface. While this puts it in the same space as several other technologies around Hadoop, Drill has some unique characteristics setting it

The social-networking company AddThis open-sourced Hydra under the Apache version 2.0 License in a recent announcement. Hydra grew from an in-house platform created to process semi-structured social data as live streams and do efficient query processing on those data sets.

Twitter has open sourced their MapReduce streaming framework, called Summingbird. Available under the Apache 2 license, Summingbird is a large-scale data processing system enabling developers to uniformly execute code in either batch-mode (Hadoop/MapReduce-based) or stream-mode (Storm-based) or a combination thereof, called hybrid mode.

The MapReduce paradigm is not always ideal when dealing with large computationally intensive algorithms. A small team of entrepreneurs is building a product called ParallelX to solve that bottleneck by harnessing the power of GPUs to give Hadoop jobs a significant boost.

EC2 users can now automate the deployment of Apache Mesos, an open-source tool to share cluster resources between multiple data processing frameworks, at scale through a new web service called Elastic Mesos provided by Big Data startup Mesosphere.

In his new article “MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases”, Ilya Katsov gives a systematic view of the different MapReduce patterns, algorithms and techniques that can be found on the web or in scientific articles along with several practical use case studies.

After six years of gestation, Big data framework Apache Hadoop 1.0.0 was recently released. Core features in the release include Kerberos Authentication, support for Apache HBase and RESTful API to HDFS. InfoQ spoke with Arun Murthy, VP of Apache Hadoop, about the new release.